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“... career was entwined, Ramsey didn’t fit the stereotype of the tortured genius. After his early death, he was eclipsed by Wittgenstein, whose influence dominated Cambridge philosophy for decades. Ramsey’s admirers have ventured to project what would have happened in philosophy had he lived. But, as he knew, the counterfactual is idle: there is no fact of ...”

“... library’s centenary as a public institution – a transformation Greene oversaw after Morgan’s death.) Some of the objects are breathtaking: the magnificently illustrated 13th-century Crusader Bible, which belonged to both Louis IX and Abbas the Great; the 15th-century Gospel Book made for an Ethiopian princess, which Greene coveted for a decade before the ...”

“... in the life and work of Ted Hughes was weird and transgressive that even now, 18 years after his death, it is hard to feel confident that his actions and beliefs and literary achievement can be judiciously and authoritatively assessed. For a start, he wrote and published at such a rate: Jonathan Bate’s bibliographic tally of Hughes’s books runs to more ...”

“... in 1953 and appeared in five separate editions, the last in 1994, nine years after Waterhouse’s death. Waterhouse’s history was quickly recognised as a classic. To a large extent he made the subject he was studying; or as Solkin puts it, ‘he revealed a verdant topography where previous observers had perceived a barren wilderness.’ He found numerous ...”

“... Party stayed away: all of the previous presidential and vice-presidential nominees (even Sarah Palin), with the exception of the nonagenarian Bob Dole; the Bush family and anyone who held an important post in the administrations of either Bush; 11 of the 16 candidates who ran against Trump in the primaries; the two most prominent Republicans in the ...”

“... a public as the American illustrated magazines are addressed to.’ Yet three years before her death, and in the midst of the Depression, she was threatening to leave Appleton ‘for the simple reason that I cannot afford to neglect any chance of selling my books’ – this despite the fact that in the Twenties she had largely abandoned her original ...”

“... which began in the 1890s, peaked between 1910 and 1920, and continued intermittently until her death in 1927, at the age of 50. In those days film was in its infancy and still silent (The Jazz Singer was released the year Duncan died). Because music – Chopin, Schubert, Brahms, Beethoven, Wagner – was the spiritual inspiration for so much of what she ...”

“... a lifelong romance with oneself. Pratt began a journal in 1925 and carried on writing until her death in 1986. She imagines her public from the start. ‘Reader please be kind to me!’ she writes winningly: ‘I am only 16 at present, and just realising life and beginning to think for myself. It’s all very thrilling in its strange newness.’ Jean wants ...”

“... logic of its not fitting any other category. It is rich in hints about the place, or non-place, of death in our lives. People used to die, now they have end-of-life issues. The single person to have contributed most to this change is Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the author of On Death and Dying and On Grief and Grieving, who came ...”

“... emphasising instead the brisker perspectives represented by Henry Fielding. Henry’s sister Sarah, whose novel The Adventures of David Simple is examined in detail here, demonstrates the power of the vision of sensibility which culminated in Richardson’s Clarissa. It was a double-edged rule, bound up with the perverse gratifications of misery. Virtue ...”

“... elements in Italy and Japan, the mass murder of the Left in Indonesia and the deployment of death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala, to say nothing of its open collusion with the Mafia and the narco-underworld in the United States itself, I don’t know that journalistic association with it (of the kind undertaken by Sir Peregrine Worsthorne) would be ...”

“... happen, we are all tempted to think like this, and to build the idea into our approach to personal death and disaster. The alarms and responsibilities of public life make it even more seductive. The suggestion that, in order to produce real security, we might have to admit that we lie open to appalling dangers brought about by our own systematic confusion and ...”

“... Taylor taking photographs of snails copulating, and Alan Taylor – who since John Betjeman’s death has styled himself ‘the nation’s Parkinsonist’ – lying on the floor recovering from delirium. The diarist comments: ‘Cynthia just did not know what to say: snail sexuality in the garden, delirious dreams – and from outside, the house looked like ...”

“... party over the cuts, the refusal of any Lib Dem minister to resign in protest (not even Sarah Teather, who managed to absent herself from several votes over cuts to welfare benefits), suggests that the differences between the parties are slighter than both insist. Most Lib Dem activists don’t think of themselves as slightly leftwing Tories; the ...”

“... was a source of weakness, ill-health, mental debility, sexual and reproductive problems and even death, from which women were freed in the early 20th century by feminism and modern styles of dress. In E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, the down-to-earth free spirit Emma Goldman gently removes the corset of the famous society beauty Evelyn Nesbit, gives her a ...”